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Summary: Business As Usual
Review: A manifesto for lower level managers whose principle talent is sniffing out power and serving it. Old wine, new bottles.
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Summary: Cluetrain is Here! Recycle All Your Other Marketing Books
Review: I recently received a letter from a company that sells software for "personalizing" consumers' online shopping experiences that illustrates why the world needs The Cluetrain Manifesto, an extraordinary polemic against the dehumanizing practices of business.Although I don't have an ecommerce site, the exhibitor's letter began, "By now you have had time to evaluate your Internet sales numbers from last quarter and hopefully you met and beat them." The letter was insulting by violating simple etiquette and unauthentic because it showed total ignorance of my business. The letter began "Dear David." Can't you hear Andy Rooney saying, "Does it ever bother you when people you've never met, and aren't sure you want to know call you by your first name right off the bat?" The letter writer thinks that using first names personalizes a letter. But first names are properly an acknowledgment of personhood. I'm not a person to that letter writer. I'm just a string of 0's and 1's in his database. I'm no more a real person to him than are website visitors analyzed by his company's personalization software. This company doesn't know what personalization is about. Its shtick is depersonalization, a corporate perversity The Cluetrain Manifesto rails against. Cluetrain is the product of marketing specialists Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger who posted 95 theses on the virtual doors of the Internet, indicting the corporate world for exercising unforgivable arrogance in the marketplace, and suddenly were getting thousands of hits daily. Perseus Books quickly came up with a handsome offer for Cluetrain, the book. These putative Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse that will lay flat the walls of the Old Economy declare that business no longer controls the marketplace. Their Sixth Thesis counsels "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media," then business is warned by the Seventh Thesis: "Hyperlinks destroy hierarchy." Hierarchies rank people and restrict information flow because information access is a function of rank. Hyperlinks democratize information flow, nullifying the main offensive weapon that hierarchies depend on to remain hierarchies. Most leaders in Old Economy hierarchies see the Internet as just a new product distribution channel. They don't realize that the Internet is a new conversation channel that greatly amplifies the voices in the marketplace. As Cluetrain's First Thesis states, "Markets are conversations." If you're tenaciously anchored to the Old Economy, the First Thesis's real meaning might not click in at first. But work at it. Make it the opening topic of your next staff meeting. With persistence, you'll see what it means. Suddenly you'll find yourself at the gateway to a much different world, kind of like when Dorothy stood in the ordinariness of her tornado-tossed black and white Kansan house and first beheld the splendiferously colorful glory of Oz. Cluetrain's authors are not wet-behind-the-ears webheads, but seasoned businessmen who grew tired of mass manipulation of people, and endless trickery, cajolery and even threats to get them to buy mass produced products thrust at them by generals of mass marketing in the "battle for their minds" as Al Reis and Jack Trout characterized marketing in a book called Marketing Warfare. Here's a military metaphor for the clueless who still define marketing with military metaphors: Cluetrain's book jacket poses a question that penetrates the mind like a smart bomb burrowing into one of Saddam Hussein's subterranean bunkers: "What if the real power of the web lay not in the technology behind it, but in the profound changes it brings to the way people interact with business?" Wow! There's a hint of Ted Kaczynski in that question, for as a society have we not become too obsessed with technology to see our humanity? Does this blinkered view make it easier for executives and managers to be as unaware of a receptionist's or entry level worker's humanity as the personalization company who wrote me that letter was of my humanity? Cluetrain is written write with the ink of irony. Its authors aren't looking to start anything - no Naderesque foundation to squabble endlessly with corporations, no legally constituted organism to spread their message. All they want to do is to remind us all of our humanness in such a provocative manner that their lessons stick and grow to envelop the thinking of people who run companies and make marketing decisions. Cluetrain's authors believe that as people regain an enlivened sense of their humanity through conversations made possible by the Internet, what ever is best that could happen will happen. They abhor the idea of shackling Cluetrain thoughts to a legal incarnation that would soon lose touch with humanity in order to promote itself and its leaders. The Cluetrain Manifesto is a way of thinking that can lead businesses toward success in the unstructured environments of the Internet. Of course, many Old Economy business leaders want their Internet operations to have palpable structure like their bricks and mortar operations have, but they won't succeed. They are like Archimedes wistfully imagining that if only he had a place to stand he could move the earth. There is no place to stand for leveraging the Internet in ways that will give anyone control over its movements. Cluetrain portends the end of control strategies in business. The Old Economy ethos of control is being replaced by a New Economy ethos of influence. This means The Cluetrain Manifesto instantly makes whole libraries of books on marketing obsolete because they are all based on an ethos of control and written from a vendor perspective. So empty your book shelves of all the covers you have on marketing and recycle them. That's their only value now. The Cluetrain Manifesto is the only book about markets that matters, because it is the first book on markets written from the consumer perspective. Buy it, read it, and be transformed! David Wolfe Wolfe Resources Group Reston Virginia
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Summary: Cluetrain chugs right
Review: Delightful read. Aided and abetted by a firm resolution not to take oneself too seriously. Conversations .... between two connected individuals ... thats always been the basic building block of the internet. My advice to the CEO of the next eCompany-Wannabe: 1) Resolve to take yourself less seriously 2) Read this book 3) Go home and actually start a conversation online ...(shopping on Amazon.com alone won't carry you for much longer) Chapters 1 and 5 are keen favourites
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Summary: Entertaining and engaging discussion of eworld and marketing
Review: The authors have done a great service to all netizens by exposing new ideas about how the Web will serve the markets. As long as conversation is cheaper than tele- or e-marketing, then the consumer/customer will always get what is right.
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Summary: It's really quite simple......
Review: Read this book and get a clue. Don't and be clueless. Well, maybe you are one of the few who already adopt most of the views the book espouses. However, after hearing the way most companies are run and seeing evidence of typical mass marketing applied to the web...I doubt there are very many of you out there. All the rest of ya' need to get a copy. This book not only pointed out that markets are conversations, but it started one hell of one itself. Hopefully we'll all listen up!
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Summary: The Last Chance to get a Clue -- before it's too late!
Review: Outside, and inside my "day job," I have spent the last three years immersed in cyberspace conversations. The Cluetrain Manifesto accurately reflects the feel of this medium as much as any book could. It reads like a long and intense rap session, and it hits reality again and again in a way that corporate America so far fails to by and large. Trust me, you haven't read a book like this. If you feel as though you do not yet understand cyberspace, this book will immerse you in the culture in an easy to understand yet frequently irreverent way. The topic of this book comes down primarily to people, conversation, and culture. Not business, and not technology. The common misperception that business and technology form the driving force behind the Internet, reflects a common misperception still very prevalent in society at large. It reflects a misperception that will cost companies billions and billions of dollars if they continue to believe it. Indeed it probably already has. In a turn of events that will send shudders of terror through corporate America, most of the business-as-usual ways of thinking, acting, and talking, of the last century prove absolutely toxic to the would-be successful corporation doing business in this new medium. In yet another turn that will provide some comfort, most of what you know about life outside your current "day job" will prove more useful than anything you ever could have learned in obtaining a marketing degree. If you hate your job, but you love the rest of your life, you may find yourself far ahead of those overachieving "team players" who love business as usual. Cyberspace changes the rules, and the Cluetrain Manifesto shows us how. The payoff in understanding this, will prove handsome. Corporate manager types who wonder how to turn their employees "wasted time" on the Internet into money and "market share" now have their answer. The answer, however, means that they must accept that they will never really have control over their employees again. Of course the easiest way to accept this is to realize that they never did.
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Summary: A business book for people who don't like business books
Review: I don't much care for business books. But this one blows away the category. Business is, after all, not about dollars. It is about people. Dollars are simply a way to keep score. And what could be more human than conversations? The notion that markets are really conversations is so old it's new. The Cluetrain Manifesto shows how we humans lost our way accepting the command and control structure and format of modern business. We have been engaged in a one-way conversation, with companies doing all the talking, while most folks tuned out the message. This book demonstrates how the Internet is bringing people back into the commercial process. Technology has frequently been perceived as dehumanizing our world. That's why it is especially ironic that it took a technological revolution in communication to bring back the human side of commerce. We are seeing a sea change where commerce is moving from a seller's market to a buyer's market. Read this book. Pass it along to your boss. Give it to your employees and your customers. Buy copies for the heads of your engineering, marketing, manufacturing, corporate development, or whatever group. The brave new world is here, but Big Brother's not in charge. We are.
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Summary: Hometown Boy Makes Good!
Review: I've known Chris Locke since a neighborhood dude introduced me to him after we'd all dropped out of college to find ourselves with the aid of certain chemicals, leaves and assorted cacti and fungi. He had a dog that looked like the white dog from Disney on skids. He also lived life at its most shamanic for a time. I got to know him again as a lost soul wandering among the cube farms of yore. While disguised as a cunning warrior he still sustained a manic connection to the laws of absolute glee. He's taught me a lot about the funhouse mirror world of self-inflicted simulcra we work in. I know less about these other worthy gentlemen but trust they are the same exemplars of sobriety, rectitude and tact that characterizes Mr. Locke. But, what's it all about?, you say. You say you work in a world where the fastest computers and biggest monitors gather dust in executive suites? That the product managers don't understand the technology? That marketing is still lobbying to put P. T. Barnum on Mt. Rushmore and the salesmen all drive away after leaving their laptops on the bumper? Well, no use ta frettin' and pinin' , this h'yere book will do ya good. As the Firesign Theatre sez, 'it's the future, live it or live with it!'
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Summary: "The truth is already here..."
Review: After reading heaps of books on the internet and business, here is one which really offers a unique perspective. Wacky yet logical, funny yet tragic, whimsical, yet empirically and intuitively sound. It's the first book that has given a plausible explanation at a human level why the internet is the phenomenon it has become. For all in business, this is the voice of the market, and indeed, maybe the people. It should be required reading by all snr mgrs looking to move their businesses onto the web.
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Summary: Something for everyone
Review: As I said when I signed the manifesto: "95 [theses] seems just about right... After more years in more careers, it's nice to see the laws of physics have not been repealed. Whether public or private sector, mega corp or sole prop, metropolis or village, there is something here for everyone."
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